Emotional design: An overview

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post on inclusive design, covering three levels of UX design:

• Level 1 — Usable design
• Level 2 — Accessible design
• Level 3 — Inclusive design

In this post, I’ll expand this framework by elaborating more on another design level: emotional design.

What is emotional design?

Emotional design is the art of creating experiences that consider the emotions that users experience throughout the process.

Designing for emotions is essential because humans tend to first make emotional decisions and then justify them with logical explanations and arguments.

In other words, designing for emotions means accepting the fact that the human mind doesn’t run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol and making design decisions optimized for emotional reactions first rather than focusing on pure logic.

Three categories of emotion

There are three main categories of emotion that we, as human beings, desire:

1. Dominance — e.g., feeling of power, fame, status, accomplishment
2. Balance — security, safety, health, friendship, tradition
3. Stimulant — humor, joy, fantasy, pleasure, diversity, creativity

Although we all experience the same spectrum of emotions, we value them differently. Some people value balance the most and focus on building a harmonic life. Overachievers often chase dominance, whereas daredevils tend to be addicted to stimulant emotions.

This distinction is critical. Although your design can target multiple emotions, you must prioritize one emotion group over others. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a design that resonates with no one.

Emotional design tool: Limbic map

Now that we’ve covered some emotional design theory, let’s get more practical.

My go-to technique to incorporate emotional design is to use a limbic map.

A limbic map shows how various emotions relate to each other and to the three emotion groups we covered earlier:

There are multiple ways to use a limbic map. Here, we’ll focus on creating limbic map personas.

All your personas (target segments, ideal customer profile, or whatever tool you use to collect data about your users) can be mapped on the limbic map to give you better visibility of what emotions you should target to win these particular users:

You would design a completely different landing page, user journey, or communication for the first persona, who values performance, efficiency, and precision, than for the second persona, who values tolerance, diversity, ease, and spontaneity.

A limbic map is a great way to increase your personas’ value and applicability significantly.

How do you create a limbic map persona?

Whether you already have user personas or are starting from scratch, the process is roughly the same.

The first step, as always, is research. Talk to your users and discover what emotions they value the most. You can do that with:

• Dedicated scoring surveys
• In-depth interviews
• Sentiment analysis
• Experience sampling
• Facial expression analysis

Look for segments that prioritize similar emotions. You’ll likely discover more than one limbic persona.

The next step is to eliminate conflicting values in your personas. For example, something is off if one of your limbic personas values adventure and security or both tradition and rebellion.

You either need to do more research to determine which conflicting emotions are more important or further subsegment your personas until you end up with cohesive results — that is, emotions that are close to each other in a limbic map.

Finally, put your one to three most important personas on the limbic map for better visualization.

Auditing and designing products for emotional alignment

The last step of the emotional design process is to adjust your design to match the emotions your personas seek.

Start by auditing your existing product if you have one. Look at each section separately and try to assign it a corresponding emotion from the limbic map. This will give you a bird’s-eye view of how you align with your users emotionally:

If you are unsure what emotions your product sparks, consider running five-second tests. Show your users your website for five seconds, and ask them what they remembered and what they felt during those five seconds.

Lastly, experiment with changing parts of your product that conflict with your users’ desired emotions. The emotions your product sparks should align with the feelings your users value, which is the cornerstone of emotional design.

Designing for multiple emotional personas

Your product might target conflicting user personas, which is often the case for products with multiple use cases.

There are two ways to deal with this situation:

• Finding an ideal persona
• Creating multiple funnels

A/B test to find the ideal persona

The first approach is to prioritize one persona over the other. A/B test a few placements with variations emotionally optimized for different personas and see what performs better. It’ll give you quantitative insight into which groups resonate better with your offering as a whole.

Create multiple funnels

For bigger products, focusing on just one primary persona might not be viable. In such cases, consider creating multiple funnels per persona.

For example, you could have different landing pages for marketing campaigns targeting different personas, which can lead to slightly adjusted sales funnels and checkout flows.

Although it requires a lot of effort, it’s still the most efficient approach if you want to accommodate multiple emotional personas at once.

Summary

Humans are not rational. If you want to improve your UX game, you need to design for the irrational emotions that drive human behavior, not for sound logic.

One way to achieve that is to map your user personas on a limbic map and ensure that your product radiates emotions that are important to your users.

Designers who learn how to design for emotions tend to deliver exceptional results in their work. It’s a skill worth honing.